Malicious botnets are one of the most potent threats to networking systems. Networked computers may become bots, i.e., entities of malicious botnets, and may provide a platform for performing malicious activities such as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, information gathering, distributed computing, cyber fraud, malware distribution, unsolicited marketing, etc.
Botnets infect networking systems through a complex sequence of steps including malware propagation, call-back (rallying) and command-and-control (C&C) operations. Once a botnet is established, a botnet's originator (or “bot master”) can control the botnet entities (bots) remotely via a C&C server.